Are Search Engine Marketers Warming up to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?

SEO PowerSuite

SEO category is sponsored by SEO PowerSuite. Power-charge your SEO with the industry's finest SEO tools. Rankings, backlinks, competitors, reports, analytics - you name it - all in one place. Try it for free now!

Enhanced Campaigns Disliked by People Who Hadn’t Tried It Yet

At my company, WordStream, we conducted an informal poll of approximately 200 advertisers who attended one of our webinars, on Friday February 15 – just over a week after the initial launch of enhanced campaigns.

We asked advertisers if they had a chance to use the new enhanced campaigns in AdWords, to which just 14% of advertisers said yes, as illustrated in the webinar screen capture below:

Now, even though only 14% of respondents had a chance to try out the new enhanced campaigns, when asked a follow up question: “What do you think of the new AdWords enhanced campaigns?”, excluding those who were indifferent/no-opinion, detractors outnumbered fans by whopping 24:1 margin, as shown here:

Also, nearly half of the advertisers who said they were upset about enhanced campaigns hadn’t tried it out yet.

17% of Advertisers Have Already Upgraded to Enhanced Campaigns

Now fast forward another week and a half to Tuesday, February 26, which is roughly 3 weeks from the time of the enhanced campaigns announcement.

Again, approximately 200 advertisers attending a WordStream webinar event were asked if they had upgraded to enhanced campaigns yet – 17% of advertisers said they had upgraded – which seems like a high number considering that Google had just finished rolling out enhanced campaigns to accounts in February!

Online Petition Losing Steam?

While 17% of AdWords advertisers were busy upgrading to enhanced campaigns, it’s also worth noting that the online petition seems to have lost some momentum and has been stuck at around 900 signatures for the past week. The petition is now adding roughly 5-10 signatures per day, which isn’t a huge number considering Google has several million advertisers.

Disclaimer: Not a Scientific Study

I run WordStream webinars every week or so and promote them via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, my blog, email, Google Display Network, etc. – and this generally produces a random sampling of attendees. However, approximately 10% of my webinar attendees were existing WordStream customers, which probably biases the survey results.

Also, I stupidly didn’t ask the identical questions at the two events. Therefore I freely admit that the data here isn’t a true scientific survey – it is what it is. However it seems to me based on my admittedly imperfect observations here, that the more people use enhanced campaigns, the more they find stuff they like.

Have you upgraded to the new Enhanced Campaigns yet? What do you think about them? Are you warming up to Adwords Enhanced Campaigns? Let me know in the comments below!

It’s funny you say this… I was just thinking the other day that its not so bad and found myself going through account saying to the guys, lets just used enhanced campaign settings and increase/lower the bid adjustment.

I would still love the option of a non-desktop campaign… But there are ways around the current setup to achieve a similar type of campaign..

I would love to know how we can still set campaigns to target tablets only?

I have a campaign which performs well on tablet but poorly on desktop. This led to the campaign being split to target each device (as Google once advised too) and bids were adjusted accordingly. When I am forced to put both of these devices back into one campaign, bids will be reduced for tablet to counteract the poor performing desktop.

I tested the new enhanced campaign and I thought the changes all in all were good, except the desktop/tablet problem and creating a percentage bid adjustment for mobile is just nuts!